How much to stick to the packaging layout of native packages

[Erik van Pienbroek]

Hi all,

While reviewing mingw32-gstreamer [1] I've stumbled upon a situation
where more feedback is appreciated. The packager has based this package
upon the native gstreamer package. While there's nothing wrong with that
approach I have my doubts whether some things are okay in respect to the
Fedora and Fedora-MinGW packaging guidelines.

The native gstreamer package consists of a main package and two
subpackages, -devel and -tools.

As no packages in the Fedora-MinGW toolchain have -devel subpackages
(everything is a library) the packager decided to comment out all the
-devel subpackage parts in the .spec file. While this makes the .spec
file harder to read the packager has indicated that he prefers to keep
the commented out parts for easier merging with native changes. Doesn't
this conflict with the Legibility-rule [2] in the Fedora packaging
guidelines?

The -tools package contains just some .exe files. Are such packages
containing only binaries welcome in our Fedora-MinGW project? If so, is
it okay to put them in separate subpackages or should they be moved to
the main package?

Could someone mention their opinion about what's best to decide?

Regards,

Erik van Pienbroek

[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=491317
[2]: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Spec_Legibility